Mozilla To T-bird: Move Out

Mozilla has been supporting Thunderbird as a product since the beginning of the Foundation. The result is a good, solid product that provides an open alternative for desktop mail. However, the Thunderbird effort is dwarfed by the enormous energy and community focused on the web, Firefox and the ecosystem around it. As a result, Mozilla doesn’t support Thunderbird as much as we do browsing and Firefox and we don’t expect this to change in the foreseeable future. We are convinced that our current focus – delivering the web, mostly through browsing and related services – is the correct priority. At the same time, the Thunderbird team is extremely dedicated and competent, and we all want to see them do as much as possible with Thunderbird.

I use and like Thunderbird, but it is definitely something that you have to really want. One example is when you have multiple accounts, something that most ISPs routinely bundle these days. You might be wrestlingfan42@your-isp.net, but will you want that to be your address for Monster.com? No, you will want firstname.lastname@your-isp.net or a similarly no-nonsense address.

So what does T-Bird do for you? It makes it more difficult to set this up, insisting that you should have one and only one sending address and server. I do not know who thought that up, but that alone is a reason I cannot recommend T-Bird for non-tech users with multiple addresses.

Another area that T-Bird can improve is in realizing that its competition is not the moribund Outlook Express, but the full-featured Outlook client as well as Web-based e-mail services. Having Lightning pre-installed will make the product significantly better, even if it is off by default. Sit down with Google and Yahoo! to discuss how to make their calendars and yours work together better. Maybe they don't get it yet, but I only have need for one calendar, or maybe (depending on your employer's level of paranoia) one for work and one for everything else.

If Thunderbird does get spun out, I’d suggest bundling Lightning and Sunbird into the new group also. My best suggestion is to work out some kind of partnership agreement with the Open Source Applications Foundation‘s Chandler Project to try to make something that is demonstrably better than Outlook / Exchange. Chandler (and its Cosmo server) has been slow-moving, so a few additional resources might really help out.

I have been watching T-Bird for some time, waiting for it to grow up into the kind of client that will really compete with proprietary clients. Right now, T-Bird lacks a few things that would make it the go-to client for power users.

Better handling of newsgroups. I’d also like to see support for non-Usenet message boards, such as PHPBB sites.

Built-in calendaring (the Lightning extension), with full support for iCalendar and optionally its vCalendar ancestor, plus CalDAV and importing from embedded hCal microformats in Web pages.

Some task management and light project management functionality built in

Integrated IRC, XMPP/Jabber, and SYLC client

Integrated address book / contact manager

Easy integration with major Web-based e-mail services.

The thing is, I know that Mozilla has limited resources. While I feel that T-Bird greatly benefits reputationally from its association with Firefox, T-Bird and Lightning / Sunbird need more community contributors. One thing that I think T-Bird has going for it is that it does not (as far as I know) depend upon Mono. There is growing uncertainty about Mono, given MSFT's patent saber-rattling, so avoiding Mono is good.

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5 Comments

1.Eyal Rozenberg | Friday, 2007-August-03 at 23:56

Actually, Mozilla’s resources are almost unlimited at this point, with dozens of Millions pouring in from Google. All the features you mention – I would guess there have been open bugs for them for yeaes on bugzilla.mozdev.org… but with just 2 developers working on the project, they can do little other than putting out fires (heh, pun there); certainly they can’t take on new large-scale projects like integration of calendaring, IM, etc. Even the core itself has its problems – important parts of Thunderbird’s core are a big mess dating from the mid 1990s which badly needs a rewrite (e.g. the MIME library; Thunderbird does not even have an internal representation of a mail message with its content which can be manipulated in code).

So I think at this point in time the talk about specific missing features and future development roadmap is somewhat of a diversion from the problem of the big stash of money, and why tb development isn’t getting any of it, and why it seems it is managed like the undesired stepchild of Mozilla.

I agree, but the context of this article is that those involved in TB inside of Mozilla are trying to decide how to separate TB into a separate development group, where it will hopefully have the resources necessary to make it go. Assuming that such a separation happens, these are some of the items that need to be on the table at the first planning meeting.

Perhaps this will spur more of us to actually contribute code to the project. I think that would be a very good thing for TB and for free software in general.

[…] July, I wrote about the shortcomings of Thunderbird and Mozilla's decision to put it into a separate organization from Firefox. Despite the relatively minor annoyances, I generally use T-Bird fairly […]